Harischandra Khemraj

Harischandra Khemraj was born and grew up on a sugar estate, where his parents were both sugar workers, on West Bank Demerara in Guyana in the 1944s.

He attended school in Guyana and a university in America. He worked as a payroll clerk, civil servant, bank statistician, a short order cook, a librarian, a telephone operator and a teacher on the West Coast of the Demerara. During the 1980s he supported the desire of the villagers of Uitvlugt and around to read by running a paperback library during the years when books were almost impossible to obtain in Guyana.

He wrote for some years but submitted nothing until completing the manuscript of Cosmic Dance, passed on by Heinemann Caribbean to Peepal Tree on the grounds that it was too adult for their list. Cosmic Dance won the 1994 Guyana Prize for literature.